The following is a guest post authored by David Pitman (@edavepitman), co-founder of Converge (@converge_co). I was told Fred was the man to talk to about inspecting buildings. But I don't know that he's ever used email," my reference said, advising that I call his phone. Surprisingly though, Fred has a website. The sole image on the site shows him standing on a roof in a ten-gallon hat staring jauntily down at the steep angle.

The White House wound up a nationwide series of workshops on artificial intelligence today on a cautionary note: Yes, AI promises to ease many of humanity's ills, but humanity needs to make sure that flesh-and-blood policymakers are firmly in charge. Latanya Sweeney, director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard's Institute of Quantitative Social Science, said AI programs should be made to reflect the norms agreed upon by human society. "I want the people we elect controlling those norms, not the technology itself. Those norms should include supporting social equity and diversity, said Alicia Glen, New York City's deputy mayor for housing and urban development. "At its best, artificial intelligence can be a tool to promote equity, and it obviously can create huge economic opportunity for a lot of people," she said. "But it can also have discriminatory effects, whether they're intended or unintended.

Google is adding to its already substantial set of machine learning technologies with the acquisition of a French company called Moodstocks, a visual recognition machine learning technology company. Object recognition is one of the more difficult problems for machine learning, and it's a problem that Google has been working on for a while. In a blog post announcing the deal, Google noted that many of its services including Google Translate and Smart Reply Inbox already rely on machine learning technologies. The addition of Moodstock will help with visual recognition. Vincent Simonet, head of the R&D Center of Google France wrote in the blog post that Google has made great strides in terms of visual recognition technology -- for instance, if you search the word "party" or "beach" you'll get a good image match.

A few years ago, the general public thought artificial intelligence (AI) was but a futuristic technology exclusive to science fiction. That is until DeepMind was created in 2010, an artificial intelligence (AI) company that was later bought by Google in 2014, and is now making big strides in the industry. DeepMind currently boasts fully functioning artificial agents capable of doing human tasks like learning how to play video games as well as performing similar cognitive functions like accessing key pieces of information from a short-term memory. It sounds surreal, like something out of an Isaac Asimov novel. These artificial agents, or programs, are using what's called reinforcement learning (RL).

Nasdaq Inc. is trying to identify would-be white-collar criminals by using artificial intelligence systems originally built to track terrorists and sex traffickers. The exchange is testing systems that analyze data about trading activity against what traders say on their corporate chat and email accounts, in an effort to spot potential insider trading, market manipulation and other crimes faster and more accurately than current surveillance systems can. Parsing the chatter of traders in the time before, during and after transactions -- and matching those findings with trading data -- provides "holistic surveillance," said Bill Nosal, vice president of business development for market technology at Nasdaq NDAQ, 0.28% . "This can show what was happening in the trader's head," Nosal said. The work comes as New York Attorney General Preet Bharara and other state and federal officials step up efforts to prosecute financial crimes.

Jerry Kaplan, author of "Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," interviewed by San Francisco Chronicle's Thomas Lee at the Bay Area Book Festival. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to usher in a new age of affluence and leisure--but for whom? From Stanford's AI Lab, serial entrepreneur and bestselling author Jerry Kaplan introduces AI, proposes concrete measures for equitable distribution, and takes questions. "Humans Need Not Apply" was named a top ten business books of 2015 by the Economist, which called it "an intriguing, insightful and well-written look at how modern artificial intelligence, powering algorithms and robots, threatens jobs and may increase wealth inequalities." Jaron Lanier wrote that it's a "crucial book for understanding the great challenge of our times, which is how people can learn to live wisely with ever-greater technical ability."

At the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in Prague this past April, a Harvard-based artificial intelligence system won the Camelyon16 challenge, a competition comprised of participants introducing their individual AI system and its ability to facilitate automated lymph node metastasis diagnosis. Referred to as PathAl, the computing system identifies cancerous cells through deep learning--an algorithmic technique that accumulates copious amounts of unstructured data and organizes it into clusters before analyzing it for patterns. Deep learning is predominately used in speech recognition systems like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. According to one of the challenge's organizers, Jeroen van der Laak of Radboud University Medical Center in Netherlands, the technology featured in the competition went "way beyond" his expectations, as the AI's accuracy proved strikingly close to that of human beings. In addition, van der Laak said AI technology has the propensity to intrinsically redefine the way histopathological images are handled in the medical community.

This is a relatively small (read: exclusive) workshop (less than 30 attendees), fostering close interaction and collaboration between attendees. The workshop is based on a challenge-response format where a series of (shorter than typical) presentations outline important challenges (rather than results), which are then collaboratively addressed by several small teams which subsequently present their results to the whole group. Presentations are 25-minutes long, followed by 45-minute teamwork. Results of teamwork is subsequently presented to the whole group in a 45-minute session. The workshop concludes on the third day (optional) with a half-day trip (9:00 - 14:00) to the Icelandic countryside (depending on sufficient sign-up).

NEW YORK (TheStreet) --As tech titans and media moguls gather in Idaho's Sun Valley, CNBC's Julia Boorstin sat down with LinkedIn (LNKD) co-founder Reid Hoffman to discuss the future of artificial intelligence today on "Closing Bell." "I think artificial intelligence is going to be transforming massive swaths of the area of work in the economy. Ten to twenty years from now if you're going to be an effective lawyer, doctor, or financial analyst, it will be in part your ability to use the technological implements, loosely going under the name of artificial intelligence," Hoffman explained. "I believe it could have very positive effects, but it does have very dynamic effects. Jobs will be going away and we have got to focus on entrepreneurship and creating new jobs. However, the jobs that do exist will be technology enabled and part of the skill set is having the necessary technology skills," Hoffman said.

Discussing the pros and cons of articial intelligence is, to be sure, an emotional topic. People have feared artificial intelligence (AI) almost as soon as it was invented. Hollywood in particular has done a masterful job of stoking those fears with movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Terminator" and "The Matrix" all making AI systems into demonic forces. Most recently, renowned scientist Stephen Hawking told Larry King he thought humans and AI could "co-exist," but that "a rogue AI could be difficult to stop" without appropriate safeguards in place. Coming from someone like Hawking, that kind of warning carries some weight with people.